I wanted to add something to my Japanese learning to improve my listening/speaking skills (on top of what I am already using). Nothing major but it’ll be a small practice that will build up over time. The goal is to take one series and “decrypt” it 100%. For my example I took the JDrama “Rich Man Poor Woman”.
So I take an episode and I try to understand every sentence as much as possible (one sentence per day). Instead of doing it on my own I decided to share it so that everyone can benefit from it. That’s why I might make a topic for every episode or something (please don’t ban me) as it’ll be quite long. I won’t post 100% of the sentences, especially if it’s like ”はい、ありがとう” or ”わたしわにんげんです” but rather sentences that aren’t obvious to new speakers(kind of like me).
English is my third language and I learned it through fun stuff, not “school-type” of stuff. That’s why I am constantly looking for new ways to have fun in this Japanese journey and I hope I can at least motivate some people here . The reason I use a JDrama is because it’s the closest material to real life(and fun!) not like anime, which I like as well.
Enough with the rant of whatever you wanna call it, it’s time to dive in and we will kick things off with the first sentence, OBVIOUSLY! Just kidding, the second sentence!
THE BEGINNING
It’s translated as “I can’t reach him”(phone call). Though I hear something like "なでない” and I couldn’t find anything about it on the net that made sense. Anyone has a clue about this?
PS : K.O from the beginning, the struggle is real…
^ These are the only two coherent phrases I can think of that sound somewhat like なでない.
It’s more likely that it’s something in the form 〜が出ない (because が can sometimes sound like な), but I’m not sure what the 〜 might be.
I have nothing useful to add to the topic, but just wanted to say that I hope someday my Japanese is as good as your English! I never would have guessed it’s your third (!) language.
Yeah it’s really weird, at least I learned that “出る” also means “not answering the phone the phone”. Because here I just learned the “to go out” meaning. Thanks to this. It’s probably something like your first sentence but the guy says nothing before the what sounds like “na”. Thank you anyway, let’s say we got this
@MosbyNeko Look at it from this way, you are already way better than me at Japanese so you can do what I did as well
English is one of the easiest languages because you see it everywhere no matter who you are. As for asian languages, you will never come across them if you never really look for them
Alright, let’s move on to another sentence. This one is translated as “what does he mean by that” (while reading a phone message). What I hear ”（にく）いみわかる”. So “imi” is meaning, “wakaru” is to understand, therefore the first word makes the sentence negative as in “I don’t understand / I don’t get it”. But for me “niku” means meat, I might just be hungry who knows…
Following up with Nath’s advice, you should just get the subtitles, read and translate them (JP => EN) beforehand, and then watch (that part of) the show. It would make more sense that way (aka more efficient). @Draga
That’s a very ambitious project for a beginner. I wish you the best of luck. But don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work yet.
Which other languages do you know?
